DUI fatality suspect has had past problems

WESTTOWN — When Robert Landis’s pickup truck tragically collided with 24-year-old Liam Crowley’s motorcycle on April 26 along Route 202, it was not the first time he was accused of driving under the influence.

According to court records, it was not the second, third, fourth, or fifth time either. Landis, 49, has at least five DUI convictions dating back until 1982.

In 2010 he was sentenced to 18 months to four years in prison for driving on a suspended license while under the influence. He was later released on parole.

On the night of Crowley’s death, police said, Landis again was driving with a suspended license. And that incident was not Landis’s first brush with an accidental fatality.

In 1981, Landis was charged with criminal homicide, involuntary manslaughter, and recklessly endangering another person after the shooting death of his then girlfriend, Denise DiCarlo.

At 8:32 p.m. on June 25, 1981, Westtown Police Department patrol officer David Balben was alerted to a shooting at 928 South Concord Road. According to court documents filed at the time, the officer arrived to find a man standing in the road and waving his arms, searching for help.

The man, identified in the documents in as Robert Waters, told the officer that a woman had been shot inside the home. According to the court documents, Waters told Balben that a man named Bob had shot her, and that it was an accident.

Balben encountered a second man, identified as James Shortlidge, near the home’s garage. Shortlidge told the officer the same thing that Waters had just minutes before. A woman named Denise had been shot, a man named Bob had shot her, and it was an accident.

When Balben entered the home, he found Robert Elwood Landis seated at a kitchen table with a neighbor. When the officer asked what had happened, Landis told him “I shot Denise. It was an accident.”

According to the court documents, the officer found the body of Denise DiCarlo lying in a large pool of blood in Landis’s bedroom. On the bed he found a shotgun. He then checked the victim for a pulse, but there was none.

When he went back to the kitchen, Landis was still sitting at the kitchen table. According to the court documents, Landis began volunteering information about what happened. The officer stopped him, and read him his Miranda rights.

Eventually, Landis and the two witnesses were taken to the West Chester police station, where they were placed in separate rooms and interviewed. When Officer Balben received a phone call confirming that Denise DiCarlo had died, Landis was informed that he was under arrest for criminal homicide, the court documents said.

After his arrest, Landis was fully cooperative and volunteered to give investigators a detailed account of what had happened. According to the documents, Landis told police that the group had bought some beer and went swimming. On the way back from the swimming hole the group picked up a few six packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, but that beer was untouched when police arrived at Landis’s home, the documents said.

When they returned home Landis wanted to show his friends a shotgun that his father had given him, the court documents said. As he was handling the weapon, it fired, fatally wounding DiCarlo.

The charge of criminal homicide was eventually dropped by the Chester County District Attorney’s Office after the investigation concluded that Landis had not intended to shoot DiCarlo. Later that year, Landis went to trial in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas on charges of involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

The assistant district attorney tasked with prosecuting the case, Anthony A. Sarcione, is now a Court of Common Pleas judge in Chester County. Coincidentally, he is also the judge that sentenced Landis to his most recent prison term in 2010.

In December, 1981, Landis was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. In January 1982 the charge of recklessly endangering another person was dropped by the District Attorney’s Office. At the time information presented at trial led jurors to believe that DiCarlo’s shooting was accidental.

One person familiar with the facts of the 1981 trial said the presiding judge, Judge Leonard Sugerman, refused to allow prosecutors to present evidence that Landis had been smoking marijuana just before the shooting. If that evidence was allowed, the source said, it could have demonstrated a factor of negligence or recklessness that may have led to a conviction on the involuntary manslaughter charge.

Shortly after the trial, Landis began having issues with drinking, sources say. His first arrest for driving under the influence came in January of 1982, the same month prosecutors dismissed the final charge stemming from DiCarlo’s death.

Since then he was charged with driving under the influence six other times. In 1997, he was charged twice in a span of less than a month.

He will likely face his eighth DUI offense this week, when he is formally charged with offenses related to Crowley’s death on April 26.

He is also expected to face homicide by vehicle or similar charges, and this time, his alleged level of intoxication will be well documented when the case heads to court.